Conspiracy theory researcher and debunker

How to Spot a Bad Scientific Study

I wrote this for ATTN: and don’t feel like it got the love it deserved. I dove into how you can tell if a new scientific finding making the media all a-flutter is actually worth your time, or something to be discarded.

How do you do that? If you can, try to read the study’s abstract on PubMed. If it’s a medical or drug discovery, see if it was a well-designed study, using randomized controlled trials and a large sample size.

Also see what conflicts of interest and funders the researchers are involved with. And if you can’t find that, try to find the impact factor of the journal. Is it well-respected by its peers. or an open-access journal that takes advantage of scientists by charging them to publish?